Re: Flashboard for a 720

Dnia 27-06-2006, wto o godzinie 12:57 +0200, Adam Pribyl napisał(a):

> As usuall, also wince has their usage. To be honest, I use linux only for 
> some specific tasks, and WinCE still does a good job in what they were 
> designed for.

If we designed a flashboard with just a bootloader on it, we would gain:
1. Smaller price
2. No size limit for rootfs (only CF cost/availability may be a limit)
3. No need for a flashing procedure (doing it once should be enough)

WinCE can be kept on an original ROM board. No need to destroy it.
I bought a second ROM board to tinker with it.

> Everything fine, but somebody has to write it.:)

I am planning to put a lot of effort in this (to learn things mostly).
Maybe I'll try to write it.

> I never saw anything like that in past, but IMHO the CF is too slow to be 
> used as flash memory (it's IDE). But I could be wrong

CF memory card has 3 modes:
1. PCMCIA - it behaves like a PCMCIA IDE interface with a fixed drive
attached (can be directly connected to a PCMCIA slot)
2. IDE - it behaves like an IDE drive (can be directly connected to an
ATA bus)
3. memory mapped - it can be directly read/written via system bus

I think it could work in third mode... what do you think?

Or not? I just found this link:
http://www.8052.com/forum/printable.phtml?id=92346&thread=92313

It would require some addtitional code then...
How about tiny flash for code that would utilize this mode to fetch
second stage bootloader from a CF card on a flash board?

Another useful links:
http://www.analog.com/library/analogDialogue/archives/37-01/compact_flash.html
http://www.8052.com/forum/read.phtml?id=92336
http://www.8052.com/forum/read.phtml?id=92354


bye,
Filip Zyzniewski